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Prada · Drawing Prada: Animated By Hand
Prada's Christmas ad sells the fact that nobody typed a prompt to make it
At a moment when AI-generated imagery is everywhere, Prada's holiday campaign makes the point that every frame was drawn by hand, turning visible human labour into a luxury signal.
4 min readOur analysis and study notes, not news reporting
The TL;DR (too long; didn't read)
- Prada's Christmas campaign, 'Drawing Prada: Animated By Hand', is built on traditional hand-drawn animation rather than computer-generated imagery, directed by Glen Luchford with animation led by John Pomeroy and campaign creative direction overseen by Ferdinando Verderi.
- The film mixes live-action footage with hand-drawn characters and winter landscapes, with ambassadors Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Chen Haoyu, Luther Ford and Kelvin Harrison Jr. appearing alongside illustrated woodland creatures interacting with Prada's latest collection.
- Prada explicitly frames the campaign around the human time and skill involved, in contrast with AI-generated work, but the campaign has only just launched and no performance figures have been reported.
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Craft as the message, not just the method
Most brands treat animation style as a background choice; Prada makes the hand-drawn process itself the headline, explicitly contrasting it with work that 'could be generated from a prompt'.
That reframes a production decision into a brand claim: slow, visible human skill as evidence of value, at a time when a lot of advertising imagery no longer requires either.
Read the original reporting